Dear Emacs developers

Thanks for developing the most extensible editor. I noticed an improvement committed to master on March 2018 that has neither been merged to the emacs-26 branch nor released. Namely encoding .emacs.desktop in UTF-8 rather than mule (commit 5bebacc476259f854d3735a6dc5a639016f1673a by Stefan "le dieux" Monnier). In fact, 2148 repository files differ between master and emacs-26 according to <https://repo.or.cz/emacs.git/commitdiff/refs/heads/emacs-26?hp=master#patch658>. Both master and emacs-26 are actively developed, yet as far as I can see only emacs-26 is actively being released. Is it time to release master under another major version number, say 27? Or are users which want to enjoy the fruits of the development on master from the past years expected to build GNU Emacs themselves?

Best regards,
Bjartur Thorlacius